


The Reality of Dreams

by trustingHim17



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Story: The Adventure of the Empty House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:15:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25436782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustingHim17/pseuds/trustingHim17
Summary: A closer look into the reunion, and the time just before.Prequel to Dreaming Reality
Kudos: 16





	1. Mail

**Author's Note:**

> Watson gives us so few details about what happened outside the case surrounding Holmes' return, I started wondering what he might have left out.

He limped his way into the telegraph office in the guise of a crippled scientist, wondering if there would be anything for him this time. It had been months since Mycroft had sent an update, and he was beginning to wonder if something had gone awry in London. His brother could take care of himself, he knew, but no man was invincible.

The line was long, and his back ached from his assumed infirmities by the time he reached the window. A fresh-faced youth peered down at him from his high stool behind the counter, glancing briefly at his awkward posture before moving on, waiting for a name to look up.

“Sigerson,” he rasped, changing the accent even in his assumed rasping voice. “Hans Sigerson.”

“One moment.” The boy turned away, searching through the filing cabinet to his right.

A moment later, a stack of papers landed on the counter, and he covered a frown. Why had he gone from no mail to such a large stack?

Gruffly nodding his thanks, he bundled the papers under one arm and limped out of the office, taking himself around the corner where he had a modicum of privacy before he flipped quickly through the stack.

The papers showed signs of damage, of wear. Something had delayed his mail for some time, and the worry crossed his mind that he had been found. Could someone have been reading his mail, looking through the information Mycroft had been providing him?

No, he told himself. If he had been found, he would have known before the stack of notes arrived.

Still, he awkwardly grabbed the stack of papers again and moved to a slightly more defensible area. If he _had_ been found, there was a chance the arrival of the mail was a trap. He would need to be on guard as he read.

Feeling slightly safer with a wall to his back, he looked quickly through the stack of mail, this time scanning the pieces of mail themselves rather than their paper. It was primarily letters, with a few newspaper and magazine subscriptions mixed in, and arranged by date, oldest on top.

The first was a quick note, jotted on a scrap of paper attached to something else, and he felt his breath catch in his throat.

“I shall attend the services.”

_No. Please, no._

His gaze locked on those five words, he felt himself sink down the wall, able to think of only one reason for Mycroft to attend a funeral while notifying him.

Forcing himself to open his eyes—without realizing he had closed them—he focused on the text, dreading what he would find.

“Watson, Mary née Morstan, died yesterday, the—” the text cut off, illegible due to water damage, but he breathed a traitorous sigh of relief. Watson was still alive. But how long had it been? The date was unreadable.

Setting the clipping and the magazine beneath it aside, he picked up the next note.

“You need to come back.”

He frowned, confused for the briefest moment. Moran had not yet made his move. The only reason for him to return would be—

The thought stuttered to a halt. Watson. With Mary gone—

“He is alone, now,” read Mycroft’s heavy, government script on the next note. “Where are you?” 

_In France, of course_ , he answered silently. _How is Watson? Give me more information!_

He quickly filtered out the scraps of paper, discarding the magazines and newspapers for the moment as he searched. His worry grew with each one.

“Send me your travel schedule.”

“Where are you?”

“Why are you not answering?”

“He is not doing well, Sherlock. You must return.”

More notes followed to the same effect, and he frowned in worry. He picked up the last, most recent, note, one written on slightly more than a scrap of paper.

“If I do not hear from you in four days, Sherlock, I am coming for you.”

It had been written two days prior, and he knew Mycroft was beginning to wonder if it was something more than the typical lying low that was the cause of his silence. Judging by the notes, Mycroft had never stopped sending mail; the mail had simply stopped going through.

There were no more obituaries, however, and he forced himself to remain collected. There was still hope. It would not do to blow his cover now, especially when he yet had no idea _why_ the mail had stopped going through. It may be that he had not been located, and acting foolish now could still give him away.

Stowing the notes, magazines, and newspapers in his carrysack, he limped his way as quickly as possible back to the telegraph counter.

“I need to send a telegram,” he grunted when he approached the window again, “to Mr. Mycroft Holmes, London. Labeled ‘Urgent.’”

Taking the telegram slip, he hurriedly wrote out his message while the clerk prepared the related documents.

“Mail was delayed,” he wrote. “Will be on first train to coast. Watch him, brother.”

Assured Mycroft would have the telegram that night, he hurried back to the laboratory, changing disguises before alerting his fellow workers that he would be leaving on the next train. It took very little time to tie up his projects at the laboratory, but he found himself unable to leave until the next morning.

He spent most of the night pacing, restlessly waiting while he fumed that he had missed the last train of the night. How dire was it, if Mycroft was insisting he return before Moran made his move?

A telegram boy found him at the station the next morning, easily recognizing the crippled scientist standing awkwardly on the platform.

“Sigerson?”

He nodded in confirmation, and the boy handed him a telegram attached to another newspaper clipping before taking off, disappearing quickly into the crowd.

Only in the relative privacy of his seat did he dare to read the message in his hand, finding a single word.

“Hurry.”

The newspaper clipping described the murder of someone named Adair, not a funeral announcement, but the fear accompanying that word chased him all the way to London, never dissipating even from his vantage point in the balcony of an inquest.

It merely transformed, becoming an all-consuming worry as he took in how much his friend had changed.


	2. Haze

The days passed in a haze of routine.

I got up, I did my rounds, and I answered the occasional call from the Yard. Then, I stared blankly through the fire in my empty house for hours, unable to read, with nothing to write, unable to do anything but think. Sometime around midnight, I roused myself from the chair to move to my bedroom, where I waited for dawn, only to do it all again. Time did not matter. The worried looks Lestrade gave me did not matter. Nothing mattered.

Why would anything matter? I was alone.

I was floating in darkness, lost in a fog. I didn’t want to be here, but I had nowhere to go. The only thing that kept me around was a lack of another place to be.

I could see Lestrade knew that, and his worried glances followed me around. He need not worry that I would take the coward’s way out, but I grew tired of the attention, of Lestrade’s worried looks, of his attempts to get me out of the house, to bring me out of the pit to which I had sunk.

So I learned to cover it. I learned to hide my thoughts, to paste an appearance of normal for others to see. It was easy, I found: I was hollow. There was nothing to interfere with whatever front I wanted to show the world. Through trial and error, I learned what people expected to see, and I gave it. When someone expected interest, I showed it. When offered the choice between a laugh and a half-smile, people expected the half-smile. When someone expected silence, that was the easiest to give.

I rarely spoke anymore.

How could I? My words had fled with Mary, floating away on the same wisp that had taken her and our child from this earth, headed to join Holmes wherever people go for the next life. I supposed it fit that the words I had enjoyed so much—through my reading, through my writing—had gone to dwell in the same place as everyone I had ever cared about.

Mary. Our child. Holmes. My words. It fit.

Lestrade frequently tried to get me out of the house. Sometimes I let him, pretending that whatever he had planned was enough to distract me for an hour, maybe two. As time went on, I got better at pretending that I was moving on, that I was recovering, living again.

If living was the presence of a heartbeat, as I had learned in medical school, then I had never stopped living. I refrained from sharing that definition with Lestrade.

The weather warmed, snows turning to sleet before melting to rain. My scars throbbed with the change, and my memories throbbed with the scars. The hardest nights were the ones where memories of Mary fought for dominance with memories of Maiwand. Sometimes they melded, turning into waking nightmares where I saw my wife killed on the battlefield in a variety of ways. I never slept after episodes like those.

I rarely slept, anyway, spending the nights staring at the ceiling above me as I waited for a “normal” time to be awake. Lestrade and other Yarders frequently passed my house, I knew, and Lestrade’s worry had rarely been so strong as the week before I had realized he could see lights through my windows at all hours.

My own mind was painful enough. I could not handle dealing with Lestrade’s worry on top of it.

The seasons changed, and I sank further, falling deep into the first thick fog, the first Black Pit I had experienced in…I was unsure how long. Since Harry’s death, perhaps? Perhaps ever. My brother’s death had been hard, but I had truly lost him long before that, when he first turned to the bottle after our parents’ deaths.

I began to understand why he had made that choice. The temptation to drink until I could no longer think was only tempered by the knowledge of what it had done to my brother. He had suffered horribly before death took him. I had no wish to follow that path.

I was suffering enough.

Mary seemed alive in every corner of that house, her ghost disappearing behind a corner, peering at me through a mirror, cooking in the kitchen. I could go nowhere in the house without seeing her, but I could not leave the house, either.

Even three years later, I could still go nowhere in London without seeing Holmes.

Every corner of London had a tie to some case, some event, some memory. There was where we had caught the jewel thief. There was where we had set the trap for the repeat murderer. There was where I had tackled him out of the path of an out of control cab. There was where he had foolishly gone in alone after the leader of a smuggling ring.

I never went by Baker Street. If the rest of London was difficult, Baker Street was torture. I had not even seen Mrs. Hudson in months, since she had showed up at the funeral.

I was alone. Completely, utterly alone, and I let myself go numb before the thought could shatter me from the inside. If I shut off all emotion, all sensation, all feeling, then I could usually fulfill my list for the day. I could do what was expected. After all, that’s all I was good for, anymore: fulfilling expectations.

Unable to stay in my house, yet unable to leave, I soon began considering looking for somewhere outside of London. If I could get away from the memories—of Mary, of Holmes, of war—maybe I could rebuild something I could call a life, a way to live out my days. I hesitated at first, however. Where would I go?

I thought over this for several days before my decision was made for me. The day I blinked out of a memory to find myself on the banks of the Thames showed the possible consequences of not changing my surroundings, and I put the house and my practice on the market the next day. I had no idea where I would go, but I needed to get out of London.

Lestrade tried to get me to change my mind, to continue the path I had been traveling in the hopes that it would get better, but I simply told him that I needed to get out of the city. I would not risk him discovering my thoughts any more than I would risk suicide while in the grips of a regression. The consequences to either were ones I had never and would never want.

He never brought it up again, though I did notice he called me out in my capacity as a Police Surgeon rather more frequently. I made no comment, willing to use the work to escape my thoughts while slowly filling my pocketbook. I would need to save as much money as possible to make the move easier, and the work granted me more time with Lestrade, who I counted as a friend, without the worry of him trying to bring up difficult topics. I respected his attempts, but none need know how much I was struggling. I had never felt more alone than the one time I had tried to voice my thoughts, and I would not do so again. I knew I was alone; there was no need to rub salt in the wound.

It was in the capacity of a Police Surgeon that Lestrade called me out to Park Lane sometime in March—without a reason to keep track of such a thing, I had long ago lost anything more than a general idea of the date—and it was the intricacies of the murder that actually captured a piece of my attention as nothing had in months. It intrigued me enough that I began using my report to work out what could have happened.

A man had died of a short-range gunshot wound in a second-floor room with the door locked. His wife had found him when she was coming up to say goodnight. When he hadn't answered the door, she had gotten someone to break it down. He had been up there alone, and there was no entrance to the second-floor room except through the door that had been locked from the inside.

It was the kind of case Holmes would have loved.

The thought plowed into me with the force of a locomotive, derailing my train of thought as I tried to write up my report. Holmes would have loved the mystery of it. The bullet that had killed Adair was a soft-nosed revolver bullet, but no revolver could have fired through a window so far off the ground, nor could anyone have climbed to the window without being seen from the busy thoroughfare. It was the perfect crime that would have captured Holmes’ attention and sent him searching for leads. I could just imagine him on the trail of the culprit, the gleam in his eyes that only showed itself when he was on an interesting case. It was a shame that he was not here to steal my report for the details as he tried to solve it before the police.

It was my own fault, I knew. I should have seen the note for the hoax it was, should not have left him up there, on a dead-end path, when he had been expecting danger.

I winced at my thoughts. Dead-end, indeed.

I finished my report in a hurry and tried to put the case—and my old friend—out of my mind, but it was no use. Memories, wishes, and possibilities took over my thoughts, and I left the present to live in the past another night, another week. What little progress I had made at living in the present dissipated, and my memories carried me through time, rendering the days a haze of movement and memory and reducing the nights to long staring contests with a dark ceiling. It became increasingly tempting to pretend to sleep the days away, to not even get out of bed.

I barely managed the inquest a few days later. It was expected of me, and I would fulfill expectations, but I had wanted nothing more than to go home and draw the curtains after an old Irregular had passed me on the street. The boy hadn’t noticed me, but I had seen him, and memories of that ragtag group through the years flooded back. Christmas surprises and childish bickering filled my thoughts instead of the details of my report, and I struggled to hide that I was not fully paying attention, that I wanted to be anywhere but there. Nothing could have made it harder to do so as when the reporter brought up my old friend, and I saw no reason to respond when the judge admonished me for drawing conclusions instead of staying in the facts of my findings. Why bother? I was no detective, and I knew it.

I was just a doctor. A doctor whose lack of detective skill had cost him his wife, child, and dearest friend.

I returned to my study after the inquest, claiming paperwork when Lestrade tried to convince me to join him. For once, I was glad of the paperwork, glad of the need to take myself to my study for a while to finish the documents relating to the week’s patients. It would give me some time to myself away from prying eyes, some time to lose myself in the memories of those I had lost. If I could not escape them, I had long ago decided, I may as well embrace them, and the inquest had reminded me of too many things to ignore.

My maid knew not to disturb me outside of consulting hours—we had been over that many times before—and I settled into the mindlessness of the paperwork as my thoughts drifted through the years.

I had little time to think, however, before a knock on the door interrupted. My maid walked in announcing that there was someone to see me, and I dragged myself back to the present and looked up. I had just begun remonstrating her—again—for accepting a non-urgent matter outside of my consulting hours when a stooped bookseller hobbled his way into my study, rambling something about apologizing for being so gruff after I had picked up his books.

I covered my confusion as my maid closed the door, not the least bit surprised at another gap in my memory. I did not remember ever seeing this man before, much less running into him and picking up his books, but this was not the first time something like this had occurred. One of the first things I had learned was how not to show surprise when faced with a gap in my memory.

“You make too much of a trifle,” was all I voiced. “May I ask how you knew who I was?”

His answer was rather longer than I had the ability to focus right then, but I gathered enough to understand a reference to his bookstore down the street, and a question regarding the empty spot on my shelf.

I turned reflexively to look, though I knew exactly why that spot was empty. I had taken down the pictures after the funeral and had not yet found a reason to replace them. Why would I need pictures when I could see them any time I wanted? Whether Holmes, Mary, or something else, I was too far beyond numb to care that the past was more powerful than the present, to care about staying where I was alone when the power of my memories could take me to years long past. Science fiction had long postulated the possibility of time travel, and I had found the secret. I had no need of pictures when I commonly traveled through time to when they had been alive.

Shaking myself out of yet another memory that had come to the fore at the thought of those pictures, I turned back to the hunched old man who had invaded my study, intending to see him out as quickly as possible. I would soon lose the ability to choose when the memories would take over, and I would much rather embrace them than have them forced on me.

The old man was gone when I turned around, however, and in his place stood Sherlock Holmes.

I stared at him, stunned at the seeming appearance of my old friend. It was not possible, simply not possible to see my dead friend standing in my study, if not perfectly healthy, then at least alive and breathing.

The emotions I had denied for so long pushed their way back in a flood. Surprise, fear, worry, anger, joy, sadness, all came roaring back into my awareness, destroying the numbness I had been using to survive for so long as I stared at the hallucination in front of me.

That was what it had to be: a hallucination. Most of them so far had placed me back in time, but there was no reason why they could not bring the past forward. One of those wishes I had been contemplating earlier had gained strength and taken down my defenses, and I hoped the man from a moment before was not still in the room. I had kept these a secret thus far and had no wish to display them to a stranger, though there was the possibility that he had just been another part of the hallucination.

The emotions were overwhelming me; there were too many to sift through at once after so many months of denying them altogether, and with my numbness shattered to pieces, I had no way to block the pain from which the numbness had been protecting me. It washed over me, combining with the emotions to take over my senses as I experienced every ounce of pain from my losses. Blackness questioned.

I granted it, wanting nothing more than to wake up and seeing no other way to kill the hallucination. It hurt too much to see him so clearly when I knew he would never come back. He was dead, just like everyone else.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself in my desk chair with my collar loosened and the taste of brandy on my lips. Holmes’ worried face hovered in front of me.

“My dear Watson.” Even his voice sounded right—a rare thing even in the regressions, much less for a dream—and I wondered which this was. Had I fallen asleep at my desk again? “I owe you a thousand apologies,” the voice continued. “I had no idea you would be so affected.”

I stared at him for a long moment, wondering if I could believe the vision in front of me, the hand resting solidly on my shoulder. If this was not real, it was the strongest dream yet; none of the others had continued after a break in the dream, nor had they been able to touch me.

“Holmes?” I asked cautiously, fighting against the hope that this was real, that he was alive after all. He said nothing, but the light squeeze on my shoulder told me that this was no hallucination, and I gripped his arm, confirming for myself that he was solid, that he was actually standing in front of me.

“Holmes!” I felt myself smile in I had no idea how long. Ages. “I…I have no idea what to say. Are you really here? Are you really standing in front of me, not forever in that awful abyss?”

Worry flickered again through his gaze. “Are you sure you are fit to discuss things?” he asked as his eyes swept over me. “I have given you a severe shock with my unnecessarily dramatic reappearance.”

“Fine,” I said without thought, pushing myself upright as I stared at him in disbelief. The answer to that question would never change. “I’m fine, of course, but I can hardly believe my eyes! To think that you would be standing in my study!” I said more, I’m sure, trying to distract him from the deductions I could see him speeding through, and I fought to pull myself together, to tuck all my thoughts behind the wall of protection I had built.

He hesitated a moment longer, saying something about having a dangerous night’s work ahead of us, but I brushed it off, promising to follow him wherever, whenever. I could do no less. I would do anything to have one more night of adventure with him, and if this was an extremely detailed dream, as I half-suspected it was, then I wanted to keep him talking as long as I could. He started his explanation, and my attention split. Part of me was paying attention to his words, memorizing them and providing the expected responses, while the rest of my focus studied him. He was paler than I remembered, and thinner, though I could hardly say anything. I could not remember the last time I had eaten, though I would have to put on a show of an appetite later.

He tried to hide it, but I could tell he was studying me as well, just as I would have expected him to do, and I wondered what he could see. I hoped very little, but I had not tested my barriers against a keen observer like my old friend, and there was the chance he could see more than I would have liked him to.

I would have to strengthen my barriers, if this proved to be reality, but that was something for later. For now, I sat back in my chair, listening to Holmes’ description of how he had survived and where he had been for the last three years as I simply enjoyed being in the presence of my old friend.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is always greatly appreciated :)


End file.
